Admiral Grace Hopper Quotes

Finally, leaders focus on people. In the words of Grace Murray Hopper, computer scientist and rear admiral in the US Navy, “You manage things; you lead people.” Naturally,

Machine problems, called bugs, were very often caused by fraying of the brushes on the counters, which caused them to spark. When this happened, the operators would go to Hopper and borrow the little mirror from the handbag she always had with her. Then they turned the lights off and held the mirror down into the machinery to locate where the counters were sparking.

It was warm in the summer of 1945; the windows were always open and the screens were not very good. One day the Mark II stopped when a relay failed. They finally found the cause of the failure: inside one of the relays, beaten to death by the contacts, was a moth. The operator carefully fished it out with tweezers, taped it in the logbook, and wrote under it “first actual bug found.

During World War II, the United States manufactured approximately 45 percent of all armaments produced by all parties engaged in the conflict. Scientists and technicians worked at a feverish rate on the design, testing, modification, and analysis of these weapons, and their efforts required extensive numerical calculations. Trained specialists—usually women called “computers”—produced many of the numbers, using desk calculators. The time required to solve a problem this way was often expressed in “girl hours.

Gildersleeve was directed to draw up the initial plans for a women’s naval force, although, as she expressed it later, “. . . if the Navy could possibly have used dogs or ducks or monkeys, certain of the older admirals would probably have greatly preferred them to women.

After a few months she turned to her brother in frustration and he found the problem: every now and then she had used octal when figuring her balance. Hopper realized that she could not work in octal all day and then live in a normal decimal world the rest of the time. Her answer was not that she should learn octal better, but that the computer should learn decimal. At this point the germ of an idea came to her to let the machine do the dirty work; she would instruct it in her own language.

She further claimed that she could make a computer do anything she could completely define. This announcement was met with great skepticism, but of course she was right.39 Hopper foresaw no end to the education of her computer. She told her colleagues that at present the UNIVAC had “a well grounded mathematical education fully equivalent to that of a college sophomore.” Moreover, the computer neither forgot nor made mistakes. It was making good progress in its undergraduate studies and was well on the way to graduation. “It is inevitable,” Hopper wrote, “that it will present itself as a candidate for a graduate degree.

Hopper’s thrust was always to simplify and to demystify. She reserved some of her most cutting remarks for those who insisted that only an expert in writing machine code could run a machine; she had no time for programmers who saw themselves as high priests standing between computers and the public.46

Failing to get institutional support, Hopper continued working on building a data processing compiler on her own. “When you have a good idea,” she loved to tell audiences, “and you’ve tried it and you know it’s going to work, go ahead and do it—because it’s much easier to apologize afterwards than it is to get permission.

From then on, whenever Aiken put his head through the door and asked if they were making numbers, if they were not, they would tell him they were debugging the computer, a term and a procedure they may have been the first to institutionalize.

Brendel also remembered a Christmas party, Christmas 1944, when the commander actually relaxed for a while and sat drinking with a group on the floor. He dared her to drink a water glass full of bourbon. She was dogged enough and angry enough with him that she did, and then walked home with Harry Goheen. “I wasn’t drunk,” Brendel insisted fifty years later, “I didn’t pass out. I’ll show you that picture. I don’t know that you can tell.

Everybody liked Grace and she liked everybody,” she said. Hopper also had “an eye for the young men,” as Brendel put it. Everyone knew Hopper was separated or recently divorced and had no commitments. At one point Brendel and the others thought Hopper and a certain navy captain “were going to be an item,” but in the end “they weren’t.

Harvard generally frowned on Aiken’s postwar activities, however, including his close ties with industry, and ultimately the continual struggle for funding drove him to retire from the university at the minimum age in 1961. When he died suddenly at a conference in March 1973 at the age of seventy-three, Aiken left a generous bequest to Harvard. His generosity was not reciprocated. In spring 2000 the new Maxwell Dworkin computer sciences building was ceremonially inaugurated at the northeast corner of Harvard University’s Holmes Field, formerly the site of the Aiken Computation Laboratory. The new building was a gift to the university from Bill Gates and his Microsoft associate and Harvard classmate Steven Ballmer. Instead of continuing to honor the name of Howard Hathaway Aiken, founder of Harvard’s trailblazing computing program, the new center was named for the mothers of the two recent benefactors. A bronze plaque on the wall of the building is all that remains today to remind of Aiken’s original inspiration. Recently a conference room at the computer center was named for Grace Hopper.

The most dangerous phrase in the language is 'we've always done it this way

Another completely different way that the contacts of a relay could fail was if dirt or an insect got trapped in the spacing between contacts. If a fly or a moth, for example, happened to be sitting on the make contact when the coil was energized, then it could be squashed and, after its smashed little body dried, the contacts would be covered with a very disgusting but quite effective insulator. To clean up such a disabled relay was called debugging, a term that has survived in the vocabulary of modern computer users trying to fix their faulty programs. This is not a joke—I heard it as a quite serious story in a lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1982 from a legend in computer science, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992), a Yale PhD mathematician who worked during the Second World War with Harvard’s five ton, 800 cubic foot Mark I relay computer, which when operating was described as sounding like a “roomful of ladies knitting.” To debug such a machine must have been an “interesting” job for someone;

You manage things, you lead people.